Social Networks

The trend these days seems to be Social Networks and keeping in touch with you friends. These networks are popping up all over the web. The popularity of “My-Space” seems to be the driving force and many “copy-cats” are showing up. I have been to “my-Space” maybe twice, I am not looking for what they offer however many people are.

My preference is “Facebook” for keeping in touch with friends and family. It provides just what I want to know about what’s going on with my friends and I can be selective about whom I choose as a friend or family. They also have hundreds of “applets” to play around with if you choose to spend hours online. I am not one of those folks. Just give me the latest news and I am off-line.

In the last few months the “hot” network seems to be “Twitter”. If you watch the “Ellen” Show and if she does not mention “Twitter” at least once, it’s a rerun. I was watching her show a few weeks ago and she must have mentioned “Twitter” at least fifteen times. So I went and opened a “Twitter” Account and found that it was nothing like “Facebook”. I was expecting some kind of fancy version of “Facebook” and, based on what I saw, it was disappointing. Just the other day I read a news blurb about “Twitter” and it said that “Twitter” has millions of accounts, but very few people actually use it.” Ellen has mentioned on her show that she has over a million “friends” on “Twitter” and that is probably what “Twitter” is for, promotion. If your famous and have a huge following and your ego tells you that your fans want to know everything about you, then you go “twitter” what your doing every minute of the day.

Just the other day a friend of mine sent me an invite to “FriendFeed”, which turned out to be a clone of “Twitter”. I had never heard of this site but after accepting the invitation I found it to be exactly like “Twitter”. Nothing like “Facebook” and boring.

For keeping in touch with business associates I use “Linkedin”. It’s straight forward and I like being able to use the “groups” feature. The “groups” feature lets me know exactly where to go when I am looking for someone I wish to contact. I like keeping things simple and I don’t want to waste any time looking all over the place or doing searches. This fits my business needs perfectly. There are probably more features that I don’t use, but I really don’t want to spend my day searching for those features.

One thing I have noticed for all of these sites and a few others that I have not mentioned is there is something missing. I have a good idea what it is, but until I do more research, I am going to keep it to myself. Something else I noticed is none of these sites are what I would call “user friendly” unless you choose to watch a video for two hours on all the features. About one minute after watching the video you will probably forget 97% of what you just saw and have to watch it again, this time taking extensive notes.

My take on all these type of sites is they are just an “Instant Message” (AOL) in conference call mode. You type the message and the other people hooked in know that you just burped.